


Mendacious - Five Prompts Version

by cutsycat



Series: Dictionary.Com Word of the Day Drabbles [1087]
Category: NCIS
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Gibbs learns a lesson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 08:11:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15287412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cutsycat/pseuds/cutsycat
Summary: What if instead of Tony being the first hired to Gibbs' team that stuck around, it was Tim. How would it be different if Tim was always the SFA and Tony was his junior agent? Will Tim handle things the same way Tony did? Is their teamwork better or worse than canon and what secrets do Tim and Tony hold about each other? Is Tim the key or is it still Tony?





	Mendacious - Five Prompts Version

**Author's Note:**

> Another dictionary.com word of the day drabble. This time from 04/22/2002 for the word [mendacious](http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/2002/04/22/mendacious).
> 
> mendacious  
> Given to deception or falsehood; lying; untruthful;as, a mendacious person.  
> False; untrue; as, a mendacious statement.
> 
> This is for prompt #5 of the March 2018 Five Prompts Challenge located [here](https://ncis-discuss.livejournal.com/137502.html).
> 
> As always comments, kudos, and constructive criticism are greatly appreciated. I'm not completely happy with this story, but I hope you guys will like it nonetheless.

# 

Mendacious - Five Prompts Version

Gibbs glared at his new hire, Tony DiNozzo, as the man flirted with another female agent again. Next to Gibbs his SFA, Timothy McGee, copied Gibbs giving DiNozzo his own disapproving stare. McGee and Gibbs had been partners in the field for a little over two years now.

They'd recently picked up a third agent by the name of Caitlin Todd, making DiNozzo their fourth and final agent to round out the team. Kate had only been with the team a few months before a case in Norfolk brought them into contact with Agent DiNozzo. Neither Kate nor McGee understood why Gibbs had offered Agent DiNozzo a spot on the team.

Truthfully, Gibbs didn't know either. He'd simply been following his gut. It had the added benefit of getting Director Tom Morrow off his back about his team being short agents, though that hadn't been a major concern of Gibbs as Morrow understood the wrong agent could do more harm than good to a team.

Only time would tell if having the full team would get their solve rates back to where they should be. Ever since Stan Burley left to take the agent afloat position Gibbs’ team's, the MCRT, solve rates had tanked. Gibbs couldn't help missing Stan; he'd finally gotten the agent fully indoctrinated into his ways.

He hated that he now had to start all over from scratch to train the agents under him as to what he expected. It had taken four months after Stan left for Gibbs to remember to order two coffees on his way to work again. Stan had always made sure Gibbs had plenty of hot coffee and it had never been the break room swill, at least not after the first time.

Stan had mistakenly brought Gibbs coffee from the break room the first time Gibbs had demanded coffee. Gibbs had made Stan drink the supposed coffee. It was disgusting. Stan never made that mistake again.

After Stan moved on, Gibbs struggled. It wasn’t just that Stan anticipated his needs. Gibbs simply couldn’t do it all himself, but he was notoriously hard to please. 

He hadn’t even wanted Timothy McGee. However, after a year of not finding anyone to his liking, Tom Morrow finally convinced him to give the promising young computer whiz a go. Gibbs grumbled, but had finally grudgingly agreed.

Those first few months with Tim were really rough. As amazing as the guy was with computers, he practically jumped at his own shadow. He more than made up for it with his eagerness to learn and desire to become a great field agent.

The first few years every time Gibbs raised his voice, regardless of the target of Gibbs’ ire, McGee would flinch. It never stopped McGee from being able to do his job, so Gibbs ignored the flinching even though it personally offended him. Fortunately, after a few run-ins with some particularly nasty perps, McGee started to grow a spine.

By the time they brought Kate on, McGee had earned the SFA spot in Gibbs’ eyes. He still had a lot of work ahead of him, before he could even be considered for a team lead or agent afloat position though. He would need to temper his tendency to jump to computer clues and ignore more mundane clues. 

He also needed to overcome his motion sickness problem. Though, Fornell’s disgruntled complaints about McGee barfing in the body bag when Fornell realized that they’d pulled one over on him had been worth any discomfort his agent felt in Gibbs’ mind. That had been during the case of a dead Navy Lieutenant on Air Force One and incidentally was also when they first met Kate.

Unlike McGee, you couldn’t miss Caitlin Todd’s balls of steel. She never took anything lying down and would make you pay if you put even a toe out of line. It made for a difficult team dynamic as McGee hadn’t yet learned how to completely take charge of a situation without NCIS or Gibbs’ rules for how to behave backing him up.

That was one of the reasons that Gibbs offered Tony DiNozzo a job so quickly. Something needed to be done to diffuse the power struggle between Todd and McGee. It also had the added benefit of annoying both of his team members and keeping them on their toes as they had definitely not gotten along with Tony during their first meeting. 

DiNozzo had a mendacious quality that neither Agent McGee nor Agent Todd could see through. Gibbs knew that it would be a good learning experience for his two agents and hopefully Tony could bring something else that the team was missing as well. His gut told him that DiNozzo was smart and a good person underneath his flashy personality. Unfortunately, DiNozzo also brought a playboy attitude that often resulted in the double glares he was currently getting from the male team members and the narrowed eyes with a hand ready to slap him from Kate.

So far, DiNozzo had avoided getting slapped by Kate, but Gibbs was sure it would happen eventually. The case where they first met Agent DiNozzo involved a dead sailor whose body had been hidden in a vat of acid in an attempt to delay identifying the body. DiNozzo had actually been the one to call in NCIS.

He’d been undercover as a security officer at Norfolk in an attempt to figure out a drug smuggling ring going on over there, but had managed to keep his cover and notify and work with McGee to figure out who the dead Naval officer was. They notified Gibbs and Kate who had headed for the ship that they believed had an imposter crew member just in time for Gibbs and Kate to prevent the guy from completing his plan to blow up the ship. Gibbs had heard good things about the agent from McGee and had been impressed that the guy had also kept his cover intact at the same time.

He’d immediately invited DiNozzo to join their team. The man had agreed provided he could finish out his undercover mission first. That loyalty to the job had impressed Gibbs even more. 

Now, Tony had finally joined the team for real and the first thing he did was start chatting up random female agents. This was like the fifth today and he’d been at it all day yesterday too. Granted they were only working cold cases and Tony had already broken one open, but the thin ice Tony kept standing on would break soon. 

The only question was who would break first. Agent Todd, Agent McGee, or Agent Gibbs? Tony hadn’t known what to make of the team when he first met them. 

Gibbs seemed like a decent guy if a bit grouchy. McGee was a bit too by the book except for when Gibbs’ rules trumped the book. Agent Todd, well, Tony wasn’t sure why her panties were always in a twist, but they seemed to be. 

McGee not to be outdone by this upstart who didn’t have a single PHD, attempted to crack two cold cases open. He thought he’d succeeded only for it to turn out that the cold case Tony had cracked open was actually the link needed to break open the other two cases, mostly because they all followed the exact same MO. That realization had turned it into a hot case as they realized they had a serial killer on the loose. 

All 3 of the agents were busy trying to one up each other, which most of the time was helpful, but in this case led to McGee being captured as he foolishly decided to follow up on a lead on his own. Nobody knows exactly what happened except for McGee and DiNozzo neither of which were telling, but somehow DiNozzo rescued McGee and captured their suspect. He’d called in the suspect’s location, but by the time Kate and Gibbs arrived both McGee and DiNozzo had vanished. 

McGee showed back up to question the guy as part of his SFA duties and by the time interrogation was finished, DiNozzo was also at his desk typing up his report. Neither of them would say where they were and why they weren’t there with the suspect when Gibbs and Kate arrived, but Gibbs knew something had changed between the two. Neither of them tried to one up each other anymore.

It was like they’d come to an understanding about their roles on the team. They both teamed up against Kate, now. Gibbs wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the situation especially since McGee seemed to be improving in leaps and bounds and DiNozzo’s own annoying frat boy behavior had also been majorly toned down. 

One thing Gibbs did know is that if they ever reached a similar understanding with Kate his team would be unstoppable. He never did find out what happened and it continued to bother him especially when McGee ended up catching the plague because of a crazy scientist. Kate stalwartly stayed with McGee and DiNozzo pretty much proved that neither McGee nor Kate were needed to solve the crime. 

Gibbs had expected McGee to come back determined to prove that he deserved to be SFA, but it didn’t happen. Instead, McGee just slipped back into the SFA role seamlessly as if he had never left. DiNozzo didn’t even fight him over it. 

Gibbs shook his head. He would probably never understand DiNozzo. For all that the man seemed to play up being a frat boy, he didn’t really want attention. 

He didn’t even fight when McGee took back the SFA position just returned to his duties like it was completely normal. They were all glad when McGee recovered from the plague. In fact, that might have been the turning point for the team.

Gibbs didn’t know what had happened at that hospital, but he knew something had happened that had bonded all 3 of his agents. Even Kate didn’t try to get one over on the boys anymore. In fact, that probably would have been the end of it, except that a terrorist named Ari killed Kate right in front of all 3 of them. 

If he hadn’t, Gibbs would have eventually figured out another way to motivate the team and they would have continued to have the highest solve rate at NCIS. As it was, they ended up getting a new team member who drove a wedge between McGee and DiNozzo. Since Gibbs never understood why they had stopped competing with each other in the first place, he didn’t know how to get them back to working together like they had been. 

He’d never have thought that he would find that the team worked together better when they weren’t competing for the top spot as that was how it had always been on the teams he’d been a part of, but they did. It wasn’t just that they had a new agent, but that she completely disrupted the team’s ability to function. If Gibbs didn’t know better he’d think that both of his agents were into Ziva and that’s why they were constantly competing now. 

However, they both knew rule 12, so Gibbs knew that couldn’t be it. It took him a while to figure out that neither of them trusted Ziva and were playing her so that she didn’t realize how close they were. When he realized that he started looking into Ziva’s actions deeper and that’s when he discovered the hidden Mossad plot that they were hiding right under everyone’s noses. 

Needless to say, Ziva didn’t stay on the team long after that. With Ziva gone, the team quickly reverted back to normal and Gibbs breathed a sigh of relief. They weren’t Stan, but they had shown him something Stan never could. 

It was possible to form a team that could survive and not need retraining simply because one person left. Prior to McGee and DiNozzo that had never been possible for Gibbs not with Stan or any of the other probies. Maybe this teamwork thing really was the key to everything and he’d been shooting himself in the foot by forcing a competition. 

It was then that he ended up adding rule 51, “Sometimes you’re wrong.” He’d never regretted adding that rule and the MCRT continued to prove that while change is constant it doesn’t have to be a constant frustration. In fact, it worked so well that other NCIS offices started to model their MCRT teams after Gibbs’ team.

**Author's Note:**

> I managed to finish one more story yesterday, so there are still 4 more days of stories! I'm still hopefully that I'll get the next 2 stories written by the time these 4 days are up. Wish me luck!
> 
> For any authors that want to chat and/or are looking for a place where they can toss plot ideas around and get input from people, you can come join my discord server that is specifically geared towards writing/encouraging people to write and authors. The invite link is [here](https://discord.gg/HFvwpCq). If you're not an author, but want to chat with me about writing/stories or anything else you are welcome to join. I reserve the right to boot you from my server if all you do is pester me about updates, however. *grin* Really anyone who wants to talk about writing and/or plot ideas for various stories is welcome to join. 
> 
> I've started a new [poll](https://cutsycat.livejournal.com/55450.html) regarding my series and which ones people most want to see continued in place of the Rapprochement series which I have brought to an end for now... 
> 
> Note: The Bishop Entanglement, Crazy Cat Tale, and Pregnant FBI Agent series will be continued no matter what, so you don't need to vote for those. For those who don't have livejournals just leave a comment with your responses. Thanks!
> 
> Also, I'm looking for some writing buddies. Full details are [here](https://cutsycat.livejournal.com/53610.html). It is friends locked, so you'll have to add me as a friend on lj before you can read it.
> 
> Also, Drakonyashka has translated a couple of my works into Russian. [Tutelage](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12378780) and [Imbue](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12378840). Go support them. 
> 
> My 2018 Prompt collection is now open [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/cutsycat_NCIS_Prompts_2018/profile). Just click the sign up link. ;)
> 
> If you are not an ao3 member, you can prompt me [here](http://cutsycat.livejournal.com/50701.html). Please follow the same rules as are listed in the above link. However, because this is a handmade prompt form(that thinks it's a poll), it is considerably more limited than what ao3 provides, so please use the ao3 form if you're an ao3 member. Please note the name option is for a name that I can say this is for so that you know it's for you. Since this is for non ao3 members it won't be true gifts, but you will be mentioned in the notes.
> 
> Feel free to leave feedback here if you think something could be improved(either in the prompt process or the story itself).


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